I love Mike Allen’s Playbook. Unabashedly. I wouldn’t even deny that it’s “the 4chan of political reporting.” But it’s the best guide to the morning news, and Allen mixes “drive the day” trivia — and there is a lot of that — with a good eye for the substance in stories.
Eh. Count me out. We all complain about pack journalism and the glorification of process over policy, but then we all start out our days with…..Playbook. And The Note. And The Page. And Memeorandum. And then we all spend the rest of the day writing about the exact same bunch of process trivia because Mike Allen woke up before us and that’s what he told us to write about.
There’s nothing to be done about this. It’s human nature. But I don’t have to like it, and I don’t.
